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Second Largest Moon

Oct. 4, 2004
The icy moon Rhea, Saturn's second largest satellite, hangs before NASA's Cassini spacecraft in this narrow angle camera image, showing just a hint of its crater-pocked surface.

The icy moon Rhea, Saturn's second largest satellite, hangs before Cassini in this narrow angle camera image, showing just a hint of its crater-pocked surface. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (950 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible light on Aug. 25, 2004, at a distance of 8.8 million kilometers (5.5 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 84 degrees. The image scale is 53 kilometers (33 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of four and contrast enhanced to aid visibility.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras, were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

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